privacy

I recently found two very interesting articles outlining two aspects of the social network Linkedin that most of the users don’t really think of. Where does your profile belong to, and… where do your contacts belong to?

Since Facebook appeared, people have started sharing information about themselves with others without really thinking the consistencies and especially their personal privacy. Linkedin was founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003,it is mainly used for professional networking. Because of its focus on professional networking it finally became one of the most powerful social media channels for corporate and local marketers as well. That it the reason that companies are encouraging employee use of the product as part of corporate marketing efforts. This helps both the corporate marketing and the employee’s career goals. Here comes the big brother! Companies have started monitoring the social media profiles of their employees, also announcing that they have a say in how their employees will handle their personal profiles. If you want to read more you may read the whole article of Deb McAlister here.

A related issue is if your contacts belong to you, or to the company that you work for. Many of your contacts after all might have become your contacts through e.g. business trips while working for your company. According to the article of June 2008 of The Telegraph a court in England has issued an order that requires an employee who resigned to start his own consulting business to turn over all of his LinkedIn contacts to his former employer – along with receipts and contracts proving that none of them became clients of his new firm. If you want to read more you may read the whole article of Deb McAlister here.

Blippy is a social media sharing site for users to post and follow each other’s updates about their purchases of goods and services. It has been described as the “Twitter of personal finance”, and is often compared with Twitter because it is based on that company’s open sharing model.

Some users who use Blippy found that the site was sharing a lot more than their purchases on 23rd of April with a lot more than just their friends. Credit card numbers for four Blippy users were found in Google search, Blippy co-founder Philip Kaplan acknowledged after VentureBeat reported on the data leak. The problem stemmed from an oversight during the company’s beta test months ago when Blippy didn’t initially realize that raw credit card data was viewable in the HTML source of its pages. The data was removed, but for some reason it is still showing up in the Google cache. More details about this incident can be found on Blippy blog and on The New York Times. CNET has all the details about the banks involved and the mistakes made for accidentally exposing members’ personal information on this page.

Every “mistake” done online can easily expose personal information, while it is extremely difficult to correct a mistake like that since there are many other services on the web caching information (the Google cache one is only one service widely known to the public)

Google’s main system responsible for the global authentication of users for its services is said to be compromised because of the hacking case that made the company withdraw from China. Part of the source code of the system is said to be stolen by the hackers raising concerns on whether they will be able to find ways of using the source code to compromise both the system’s integrity in the future and the user’s privacy.

Representatives from the company said that Google changed parts of the system in order to reduce the risk of an attack in the future because of the source code leak.